Antifungal activity of solventlessly synthesized organomercurials

A series of new barbituryl/thiobarbituryl substituted organomercurial derivatives 3a-i have been synthesised from pyrimidine derivatives 1a-c and arylmercuric chloride 2a-c over K(2)CO(3) under microwave irradiations (MWI). This solventless synthesis apart from eliminating organic solvent from workup step, also gave improved yield as compared to the conventional heating, with reaction time reduced from hours to minutes. The prepared compounds were tested against A. niger and A. flavous for their antifungal activity and were found to posses good activity.     

Low memory block tree coding for hyperspectral images

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Hyperspectral image sensors are resource constrained and have limited on-board memory. Processing of high volume hyperspectral images pose a challenge to the...     

Ecofriendly approach for detection of phenols in water using laccase from different fungi

Laccase-initiated oxidative coupling reactions of phenol and its derivatives with 4-aminoantipyrene using air as an oxidant has been investigated. The oxidation reaction of phenols and 4-aminoantipyrene is getting a lot of attention due to environmental concerns. Oxidation of simple phenol and 4-aminoantipyrene as a benchmark reaction enabled us to rank the relative oxidation ability of various laccases. Among the laccases tested, laccase from Pycnoporus cinnabarinus successfully yielded 72% antipyrilquinoneimine dye. The present method can also be used to determine p-substituted phenols and chlorophenols. In this work, the influence of mediators on laccase activity has also been studied.     

Sources of cholesterol during development of the rat fetus and fetal organs

Female rats at various stages of pregnancy were injected intraperitoneally with [3H]water; 4 h later, they were killed, the uterus was removed, and the fetuses were dissected. Lipids were isolated and fractionated by HPLC and the total amount of cholesterol in each organ, as well as radioactivity incorporated into cholesterol and cholesterol precursors, were determined. From the data for cholesterol content at each age we calculated the rate of accumulation of cholesterol during fetal development. As incorporation of label from [3H]water takes place with a stoichiometry defined by a known biosynthetic pathway, we were also able to determine the fraction of cholesterol accumulating in each organ that had been newly synthesized. For the fetus as a whole, more than 93% of the cholesterol accumulating during development was newly synthesized. As the specific radioactivity of cholesterol in the maternal circulation was negligible (because synthesis of cholesterol by maternal liver was suppressed by inclusion of cholesterol in the diet), we conclude that the fetus synthesizes nearly all of its own cholesterol; neither the maternal circulation nor the placenta/yolk sac contribute significant amounts of cholesterol to the fetus. We were also able to quantitate trafficking of cholesterol between fetal organs. Fetal brain is responsible for the synthesis of all of its own cholesterol. In contrast, fetal liver exports cholesterol into the fetal circulation and supplies about half of the cholesterol for development of heart, lung, and kidney.     

Parallelization and performance comparison of the conjugate gradient equation solver on multicore Cell and Xeon computers

Multicore accelerators are used today to supplement traditional superscalar processors in massively parallel computer nodes with extra floating‐point computation power. This paper presents our parallelization and performance enhancement and evaluation of the conjugate gradient (CG) linear equation solver with enhanced matrix multiplication on the Cell Broadband Engine accelerator. The paper also compares the CG performance results on the Cell and two CG implementations on a computer with two quadcore Xeon processors, one with OpenMP and the other with OpenMPI. We also report the enhancements made on the CG code and performance analysis of CG on single and dual Cell Broadband Engine packages with 8 and 16 synergistic processing elements and on Xeon for heptadiagonal matrices, in particular to matrix multiplication and synchronization. We also report the communication and computation time breakdowns and the floating point operations per second ratio. Our parallel CG solver is shown to scale well with data size, grid dimensionality, and number of cores. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Performance and scalability analysis of image processing applications on the IBM Cell BE simulator

The IBM Cell Broadband Engine （BE） simulator simulates parallel execution of programs on a state-of-the-art 9-core Cell processor model. In this paper, we report our experience with implementing, simulation, and analyzing the performance of image processing applications on the IBM Cell Broadband Engine Simulator measured on the IBM Cell We report the performance simulator for PPE-only and embedded applications, and with various input data file sizes or numbers of SPEs enabled. The simulator results indicate that Cell BE processor can outperform modern single-core RISC processors in orders of magnitude on SIMD compute intensive applications such as edge detection. We also explore different features and development processes available on the simulator. Different techniques for obtaining accurate results （close to real hardware result） are also explored.     

A novel plant membrane proteoglycan which causes anorexia in animals

A series of substituted 1-acyl- and 1,2-diacyl-3,5-pyrazolidinediones were found to have hypolipidemic properties lowering both serum cholesterol and triglyceride levels in rodents. For optimal activity of the pyrazolidinediones, both nitrogen atoms of the ring needed to be substituted preferentially with MeCO groups. This compound lowered rat VLDL but did not elevate HDL cholesterol content.     

Preparation and Properties of Nanocomposites Derived from Aromatic Polyamide and Surface Functionalized Nanoclay

Nanocomposites were synthesized from polyamide and aminosilane functionalized montmorillonite through solution intercalation method. Polyamide resin was prepared by reacting a mixture of p-phenylenediamine and 4,4′-oxydianiline with isophthaloyl chloride (IPC) in N,N′-dimethyl acetamide (DMAc) under anhydrous conditions. The resulting chains were end capped with carbonyl chloride using slight excess of IPC near the end of reaction. 3-Aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTS) was used for the surface modification of clay. Triethoxysilane groups of APTS promoted the reaction between silane and hydroxyl groups on the surface of clay. The compatibility between the two disparate phases was achieved through interaction of free amine groups of modified clay with carbonyl chloride of the matrix. Thin films obtained by evaporating the solvent were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), and tensile measurements. XRD and TEM results revealed the formation of partially delaminated and intercalated clay platelets in the matrix. Mechanical data showed improvement in the tensile strength and moduli of the nanocomposites with clay loading up to 6 wt.%. The glass transition temperature increased up to 134°C for the nanocomposites containing 6 wt.% clay content and also the thermal stability augmented with increasing clay loading.